Wasting Yard Waste

It’s great to look out for our kid’s future if we can but what about doing things to help our planet? After all our son and his kids are going to have to live here for a long time to come.

Is there some things we could be doing right NOW, right here at home to make life better? Yes there certainly is. Go Green Starting NOW!

We’ve had our property for a few years now and every year we are trying to go a little more green. It’s a real learning experience but one we will pass on to our son and eventually teach our grandchildren.

Back when we bought the property we have now we also purchased the lot next door so we could eventually have our own backyard garden if we decided to.

We had heard of compost but that’s about it. So, for the first couple of years we cleaned up the yard and put all the yard waste at the curb for pickup. What a waste.

We knew that it would decompose and we were really good at separating the rest of our waste but the thing we didn’t clue into was the fact we could have been doing so much better.

We even had a compostor box in the backyard, we just didn’t know how to use it so we didn’t. I live on the internet and could have looked it up but other things always got in the way.

Recycling Yard Waste

DSC03148This year we are doing things a little different. It’s going to take us a few months and we may not see results until next year but we have started using a compost box so that we can recycle our own yard waste and turn it into compost so we can use that instead of buying soil.

We started by collecting leaves from the yard and keeping them until spring instead of putting bags of leaves at the road for the garbage trucks to pick up.

We even keep the lawn clippings, again not going in the landfill but into our compostor instead.

Next we started cutting up the trimmings from the bushes around our property fence and cut them into smaller pieces so they would break down faster in our compostor.

Cutting Down On Our Dry & Wet Garbage

We have been separating our garbage for many years now and did it long before it became compulsory. We have been very strict with ourselves so that we do the best job we can.

Now we are composting part of what we previously put at the curb for pickup. That has cut our waste by about 25%, maybe even more.

Now instead of putting vegetable and fruit waste into the wet garbage it goes into the compost pile instead. We compost almost everything now except for non-vegetable matter like meat, fat and bone.

We even compost egg shells, we just crumble them up a big for faster break down.

We even compost newspaper and cardboard, only using those pages of the news print that uses black ink.

I know there is a lot we have to learn and as we do we will recycle even more.

We are even planting more trees on our property so that our backyard is even greener. The trees will help produce more clean oxygen and will also help to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Using Compost Instead of Buying Topsoil

This is our first year using a compost bin so we may not get to use any compost created this year but by next spring we should have our first compost. That will cut down on purchasing compost, allowing us to spend on other things that will make our backyard garden even greener.

Collecting And Re-Using Rain Water

We are already using water we collect on those raining days. It goes pretty quick and we then have to use the city water.

Note we cover the barrels with a fine mess to keep out leaves and things that fly through the air like seeds and even those pesky mosquitoes.

Perhaps we will install a drip irrigation system to save water.

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Filed under: backyard garden • making compost

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